Spring Teams and work

Since I last wrote I had a team of 27 come from a church in the Mississauga area. It was the second time that the team leaders had been here and so they had already formed a partnership with this church in the Shuar village of Paquisha. We spent four days there in the village teaching Bible stories in the school and helping with some work projects around the church. We painted the church, cleared some area around the church for activities, and cleared a small hilltop where the church is going to build a prayer house in the form of a traditional Shuar house. One of the highlights I'd have to say was on our last day in Paquisha, a number of the ladies gathered jungle potatoes and cooked chicken in massive leaves and we had a feast. It was a great time for the community and the team to connect.
The day after we left Paquisha, we hiked an hour into the jungle in order to get to the village of Shyrian. Shyrian started when a few families from Paquisha broke away and started their own village. Now, the church in Paquisha is starting a sister church in Shyrian and asked for our help with the building of the church and with some outreach to the people there. It is a great story of reconciling the differences between the families of Paquisha and Shyrian. It also shows the impact of the church in Paquisha where now they are doing missions work. The other good thing for this team was that the people in Shyrian had never seen white people before. It was good exposure for these Canadian high-schoolers to experience the some of the extremes of cultural differences.
Since the team left, I have been busy on a couple of projects. First of all was inventorying and marking all the gear we have. While my team was here, we had another team of 46 go into another part of the jungle. So, for inventory, I was trying to figure out a good way to clean, mark and label over 50 pairs of boots, mosquito nets and sleeping pads.
My other major project is redesigning the website for one of our ministry areas. I am very rusty on code so I'm brushing up on that first and then coming up with a brand new design. I'm also trying to bit by bit update Youth World's general site. I've started just by getting our list of staff up to date and requesting from them an updated blurb about who they are and what they do.